'Antony & Cleopatra'

Sunday

Shakespeare & Company has been playing on for 30 years. Tina Packer has been on top of the ride from the start.

“I have to say I’m astonished it’s 30 years,” said Packer, the company’s artistic director and founder. “It feels like no years in a way. Or it just feels like my life.”

It’s an ever-evolving life for Packer, who is from England, trained with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, once appeared in episodes of the vintage “Dr. Who” BBC TV series, came to this country on a grant to develop her ideas about Shakespearean acting, founded Shakespeare & Company in Lenox in 1978 and oversaw a successful move from one Lenox location to another in 2001. Earlier this year she became U.S. citizen. Now for the first time she is playing a lead role in a Shakespeare play put on by Shakespeare & Company.

Part of celebrating the 30-year success of Shakespeare & Company is the fact that Packer can take a major role acting and briefly “take my eyes off the company,” she said.

She’s directed plenty of Shakespeare, written about him, and developed “Women of Will,” her own trilogy based on Shakespeare’s relationship to the feminine, which she performed as a one-woman show in 1991 at Mechanics Hall, Worcester.

Twenty years ago she directed “Antony and Cleopatra” at Shakespeare & Company. “As a director, I thought about her from the outside rather the inside,” Packer said.

Asked the perhaps delicate question of whether Cleopatra isn’t a role normally tackled by actresses in their 20s and 30s, the down-to-earth Packer was quick to respond.

“I don’t think you take it on in your 20s and 30s,” she said, pointing out that Cleopatra has been played in recent years by the likes of Judi Dench, and, five years ago, Vanessa Redgrave.

“With the English ladies they play it in their mature years, like myself,” she said — her English accent lingering over the two syllables of “ma-ture.”

She laughed, which hopefully meant she hadn’t been offended. Then she noted that in Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” the heroine travels emotionally from being “a little girl to an old crone.” Cleopatra calls herself “‘wrinkled deep in time,’” Packer said. “There are a lot of references to the fact that she’s in the autumn of her days.” Antony, also, has seen better days, although the relationship between the lovers is extremely volatile.

“I think you need gravitas to play them, really,” Packer said. Then she added with definiteness, “And in the end, I’m an actor. And I’m going to act it. And I’m going to look pretty good.”

Marc Antony and Cleopatra have been called the couple the world would not let love. Certainly, Antony’s co-ruler, the grim and ruthless Octavian, took a dim view of their goings-on. A real-life love story and tragedy, the play also has some of the finest poetry Shakespeare ever wrote.

Packer got the idea of putting “Antony and Cleopatra” in Shakespeare & Company’s 30th season after she and Gore played the roles in a special one-time-only staged reading last summer at Tanglewood. “Playing with Music: Antony and Cleopatra” was directed by Clare Reidy with accompaniment by the Tanglewood Music Center Composition Fellows and TMC Coordinator Michael Gandolfi.

The performance whetted her appetite. “I thought, ‘Bloody hell, I had better play this. But do it now or else I will be over the hill.’ ” There was, again, a deep earthy laugh.

Packer grew up in Nottingham, and after training with the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London was an associate artist with the Royal Shakespeare Company and performed in the West End and on BBC television.

But England can be limiting to an individual, particularly someone who shows individuality. In an earlier interview, Packer recalled that she wanted to develop her own style of Shakespeare but realized she could not do that with the Royal Shakespeare Company “because there I was known as an actress and a junior person. I wasn’t male and I hadn’t graduated from Cambridge.”

Packer came to the United States in 1974 on a Ford Foundation Grant and stayed. In 1978 she founded Shakespeare & Company on leased space at The Mount, Edith Wharton’s estate in Lenox owned by the Edith Wharton Restoration Inc. The company grew significantly both in terms of audience and reputation, but its relations with The Mount landlords gradually deteriorated. In 2000, Packer seized an opportunity to buy property from the National Music Foundation a mile up the road from The Mount on Kemble Street in Lenox. A fundraising campaign raised $5 million (the cost of the property was $4.1 million) in just one year.

Attendance at Shakespeare & Company is about 75,000 visitors a year with performances taking place in the 420-seat Founders’ Theatre and a couple of outdoor venues. Long-term plans focus around “Rose Playhouse USA” — a project aimed at creating the world’s only historically accurate reconstruction of the Elizabethan-era Rose Playhouse in London, which was Shakespeare’s first theater.

The 2007 Shakespeare & Company season also includes “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (through Sept. 1), the musical “Rough Crossing” (through Sept. 2), the contemporary “Blue/Orange” (through Sept.2), and “The Secret of Sherlock Holmes” (Sept.28-Oct. 28). Shakespeare & Company also has many special presentations throughout the summer, as well as training programs for students and mature actors.

The 30th season has been going well, Packer said. “It’s pretty good. We’re on target with our sales. …

“I think as far as the company is concerned, we’re trying to institutionalize it so that it’s still here whether I’m around or not. Set it up so it can function come hell or high water. We’re ready to be institutionalized rather than vagabond artists. It feels good that we’ve got enough of it right.”

Is she confident Shakespeare & Company will be around 30 years from now?

“Oh yes, I am. Yes I am,” Packer said. “I think that’s one of the things I’m proud of — that it will be.”

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.